by Lisa See
“They asked and I turned them down. What can I say? I think the Committee of 100 is too elitist, but I also wasn’t going to be comfortable at the annual family association banquet down in Chinatown with the pledge of allegiance, followed by ten courses, karaoke, and an appearance by Miss Chinatown, all for the big-ticket price of fifty dollars.”
“It can be hard to find your niche,” Hulan sympathized.
But Michael shrugged off the suggestion and hurried on. “What else have I done? Good deeds, naturally. But giving away money isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. You give a million dollars to a museum and they say, Well, considering Bill Gates’s gift, your donation isn’t enough to get your name on the wing, let alone the building. That would take ten million dollars. So what does that leave? Travel—”
“And women.”
“Yes, and women.” He laughed good-naturedly. “You can spend a lot of money on women.”
“Anyone in particular?”
“Not really.”
“So then for travel you came here?”
“Ummm….” He mused as he thought about it. “No, first I took a villa in the south of France. Then I played around in Paris. I took about six months where I just skied—Gstaad at Christmas, Aspen in the spring, then down to New Zealand for the first snow in June. But you can do stuff like that for only so long before you start looking for something else. When you’re rich beyond your wildest dreams, it’s harder than you might expect to find what will make you happy and occupy your mind.” He cocked his head and appraised her coolly. “But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You have money. You’ve just had it longer than I have.”
“How could you tell?”
“It’s something about the way you carry yourself.”
He took the bottle from the ice bucket. She realized that the others from the Site 518 team had left.
“It’s late,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed, “but you still haven’t found out why or how I got here.”
He poured the wine into their glasses and eased back into his chair, wordlessly challenging her to leave.
“You are very kan ye,” she said.
“You think I like to brag and boast? I suppose so, but I prefer the less severe definition. I like to shoot the breeze.”
Which showed that his Chinese was not just fluent but highly nuanced as well.
“So how long do I have to wait until I hear why you’re here and why you’ve stayed?”
No flicker of victory crossed his features. No wonder he had done well in business.
“I’ve stayed because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be and nowhere else I have to be. As for your other question, I told you I took a class in Chinese poetry,” he said, smoothly transitioning back into his storytelling mode. “I kept with it even after the class was over. One night I read a poem by Meng Jiao called ‘The Sadness of the Gorges.’ It begins, ‘Above the gorges, one thread of sky.’ Later in the same poem, he wrote, ‘Trees lock their roots in rotted coffins and the twisted skeletons hang tilted upright.’ He was talking about the Qutang Gorge and the hanging coffins, though I didn’t know it then. But the haunting quality of the words made me want to look deeper at Meng Jiao, the Three Gorges, and especially the Ba, who’d hung those coffins up on the cliffs.”
He went on to talk about the poet, a disillusioned government official, who, twelve hundred years ago, had wandered through the beauty of these hills but had lived in brutal poverty. Meng had called the Ba, some of whom had still been around in those days, wild apes. Here was a man who lived so long ago writing about people who’d lived and walked this land so much longer before that. Michael’s interest had been piqued. The more he learned about the Ba and their subsequent disappearance, the more he wanted to know. Then, as he’d studied the mythology of the gorges, he’d been increasingly drawn to the character of Da Yu.
“I love to think of Yu combing these wild reaches and incorporating them into an empire that would one day become China. Besides,” he added, “Yu was a mathematician like myself. That amused me.”
“How can you possibly know if he was a mathematician?” Hulan asked. “He may not even have existed.”
“I think we should trust the historical accounts found in the Shu Ching, don’t you?”
“I don’t understand what that is, exactly.”
“It’s one of the world’s oldest books, and it’s still in print.”
But that didn’t mean she knew its importance, and this realization surprised him.
“It’s a series of historical documents that covers nearly two thousand years of history up to 631 B.C.,” he explained. “The Tribute to Yu canon records Yu’s nature as a man and a leader. It’s here that you first hear about the Nine Tripods and how the bronze work describes each province’s resources and riches.”
Michael fell silent. The rain, which had let up considerably during the day, now pelted the roof, and thunder sounded in the distance. He put down his wineglass and continued. “One thing I think is extraordinary about Yu was his vision of engineering. Da Yu chih shui. ‘Yu the Great controlled the waters,’” he translated, although she understood the words. “He who controls the waters of China controls the people. Think about dikes, canals, dams, sluice gates, locks, cofferdams. When these aren’t working correctly, then crops are flooded, methods of communication fail, territorial lines are lost—all of which lead to the destruction of empire. Yu was the first to figure that out, and the central government still believes it.”
“So he was a leader, a good businessman, a great engineer—”
“And a mathematician, as I said. Yu developed the Luo script, arranging numbers so that whether added vertically, horizontally, or diagonally they all come out to the same aggregate of fifteen.”
“I remember doing that puzzle as a child.”
“So do I, and so do a lot of kids all over the world. Today we can look at it as a childish puzzle, but Yu figured it out more than four thousand years ago. He also created the Chinese lunar calendar. You had to know that.”
“No.”
“It’s called the Xia calendar in honor of the dynasty he founded!”
“But I didn’t know he developed it.”
He shook his head, truly surprised at her ignorance.
“Wine was created during Yu’s reign. Did you know that?”
“I told you I know nothing about him.”
“Right, but wine? That’s big! Of course a man like Yu would have to be contemptuous of luxury and pleasure. So this great thing is created, he tries it, and decides it’s too harmful for his people.”
Hulan tapped a finger on the rim of her wineglass. “But I see you haven’t exactly followed Yu’s advice.”
“You’d be surprised,” Michael said. “And I’ll tell you about that one day too, if you’ll let me. But first may I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“I’ve been telling you things that any child in China should know.”
“‘If not for Yu, we all would be fishes,’” she recited. “I only heard it for the first time at lunch the other day.”
“How can that be? Did it have to do with the Cultural Revolution?”
“My ignorance? In part. I was sent to the countryside when I was twelve. I left China soon after that and didn’t return until I was twenty-seven. Whatever I knew as a child I’ve mostly forgotten. It’s a shortcoming, I know.”
As she watched him consider this, Hulan realized that tonight she’d spoken more openly with him than she had with her own husband over the last year. When Michael Quon looked at her, he didn’t see her dead daughter, her dead father, the dead women in the Knight factory, the dead mother on the square. Hulan knew she was mixing her Americanisms, but to Michael she was a clean slate, with no baggage.
Finally, as though no time had passed, he said, “You could look at it another way. You were given an opportunity, and you learned a whole set of abilities and volumes of expertise
that make you very different here. You are different. You realize that, don’t you?”
She’d lived with that knowledge every day of her life, and it wasn’t just because she’d spent her formative years abroad. She was born a Red Princess in a society that was supposed to be classless. She’d kept her individuality in a society where individuality was often singled out for punishment. She was different in her neighborhood, different at work, different from the people she’d known in the countryside, different—as Michael said—from most people in China.
He looked at her now with sudden understanding. “I bet people don’t like you very much.”
“No one’s supposed to like an agent from the Ministry of Public Security.”
“Which is why you chose the job?”
That her father had been vice minister when she started was none of Michael’s business, so she said, “I’m good at what I do.”
“I can see that. What I don’t get is why you left the States.”
“Maybe I didn’t fit in there either.”
He searched her face. “I don’t think so. I think you fit in very well, and I bet you were happy too. Why did you come back?”
“My mother was ill. I felt I had a duty to her and to my father. But once I came back and saw how China was changing, I thought I should be a part of that.”
He studied her again, this time with raw interest. Again he came to his own conclusion. “You’re a beautiful woman, Hulan, but your regrets play upon your face as though your heart were open to me. I think you were afraid to stay, afraid and…. guilty.”
“I thought you were a mathematician, not a psychoanalyst,” she retorted, trying to keep the remark light but failing miserably.
Michael laughed. “Don’t you know that all the secrets of the universe are revealed through math? Or was that another blind spot in your education?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. Instead he pushed his chair away from the table and stood. “Thank you for joining me tonight, Inspector. I enjoyed it. Perhaps we can do it again tomorrow.”
“David will probably be back by then.”
“Then I look forward to the three of us getting together.”
He saw her to the end of the second courtyard, then left her to find her own way back to her room.
AN EERIE QUIET ENVELOPED HONG KONG AS THE ISLAND BRACED for the coming typhoon. Wind whipped light drizzle in undulating sheets across Connaught Road. Though it was after nine at night, the air was unbearably hot and humid. David was gooey with sweat. Most people had gone home in anticipation of the storm, so the automobile traffic had died down and only a few stragglers were still on the streets. David kept to the exterior wall of the Ritz-Carlton as he followed at a safe distance behind Bill Tang. When the lieutenant crossed Connaught to the Star Ferry Terminal, David hesitated briefly before he leaned his body into the wind and dashed across the street.
His senses were fully heightened, and adrenaline pumped through his body. Following Tang was a rash and impulsive decision—the kind of thing Hulan would do—yet even in the irrationality of the moment David’s mind was in full gear as he went back to the very beginning of his involvement in this case. Director Ho of the Cultural Relics Bureau had talked about the importance of proving the length of Chinese culture and civilization. Vice Minister Zai had spoken of the need to prevent international embarrassment. An hour ago, Dr. Ma had mentioned that there were “factions” that wanted the ruyi. Factions. To David this meant much more than an aficionado of Asian art wanting an object for his collection. He thought again of Zai and spread his net wider and broader to include large Chinese alliances with great power. Ma’s faction would be the Ministry of State Security, which had increasingly close ties to the military. If Ma were to be believed, then Hulan—possibly unwittingly—was working on behalf of another faction within the government. And now David was tailing Bill Tang, who came from a growing cult in China. The ruyi had to have some type of iconic meaning—something that, as Ma said, could influence world stability—to each of these groups and still be of interest to someone like Stuart Miller.
Bill Tang stopped before the main entrance to the Star Ferry. David ducked into the opening to the ferry’s parking lot. Was Tang thinking of taking the ferry to the Kowloon side? David wasn’t sure if the boats were still running, since most ships and ferries had already sought refuge in the typhoon shelter behind the breakwater on the other side of the harbor. He edged out so that he could see up the street. The lieutenant jerked his head around, and David slipped back into his hiding place. His heart pounded in his chest. He listened, hoping to hear Tang move, but the howling wind made that impossible. David deepened his listening and felt something—someone—else besides Tang out there. It had to be Ma, hiding in the shadows. Was Tang aware of him too?
David peeked out again and saw Tang looking back up the hill toward Victoria Peak. David followed his gaze to the Bank of China Building. Shooting up around it were other, much smaller skyscrapers, the names of their owners smearing in bright lights across the tops. To the left and behind the Bank of China tower was another building with only a symbol at the top: a series of concentric squares. David knew he’d seen it somewhere before….
Tang was on the move again. He turned right just beyond the Star Ferry building. David sprinted to that corner and looked down a flight of stairs toward the harbor. There were no lights. The air was redolent of diesel fuel, grease, oil, and creosote. Going down the walkway was not a good idea, but Hulan would have done it if she were here.
David took about ten steps down the stairs and stopped. Waves stirred up by the wind breached the seawall below him. Great wooden piers rose up to his right. He couldn’t see far into the murkiness behind them. Tang could be anywhere in the darkness. There was no use pretending that David was sneaking up on the lieutenant; clearly he was the one walking into an ambush.
“Tang,” he called out. “It’s David Stark. Come out. I want to talk.”
A wall of rain and grimy seawater splashed against David. He held his footing, then took another couple of steps closer to the harbor.
“I know who you are, so there’s no point in hiding—”
Tang emerged from the shadows onto a platform just before the seawall. “It’s better if you don’t know who I am, Mr. Stark,” he said.
David held out his hands, catching the wind in his palms. “This is no place to meet. Let’s go inside.”
“I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt any of you.”
Tang appeared willing to talk. He also seemed to want to help—or confess. David went down another two steps.
Tang went on. “I’ve done my best to warn you and your wife.”
This was exactly the kind of thing David wanted to hear. However, instinct told him to proceed cautiously.
“I thought you might have done that,” he said, wanting to build on Tang’s admission. He casually strolled the rest of the way down the stairs to the platform until he came face-to-face with Tang. “I understand you’re a businessman. Let’s use your experience to figure this thing out.”
“There’s no way to change what has already happened. My future is already set.”
Sensing that Tang’s resolve was weakening, David forged ahead. “Tell me about—”
“Noooo!” Tang spun around on one leg. David had just enough time to recognize that he was about to be attacked and raised his arms in front of him against the blow, but it didn’t come to his face, chest, or abdomen. Tang’s leather shoe smashed into David’s head above his left ear. David went flying. He landed on his side, and Tang kicked him in the stomach. He curled into a fetal position, but it was no protection against what came next. The blow to his ribs sent pain hurtling throughout his body. Another kick in nearly the same spot proved excruciating. David fought hard against the darkness that threatened to blanket his brain.
Tang hunched over him. The smell of his cologne curdled David’s stomach. “You cannot change what will happen. Nothing can change t
he great river.”
Then Tang pulled himself back up to his full height. When he took a step back, David knew what was coming. The blow to his head sent him spiraling into unconsciousness. He had a vague sensation of being dragged, of falling, of being enveloped by cold and wet, and then sinking, sinking, sinking….
“Hang in there, David!”
The feeling of being pulled through liquid…. More pain as someone reached under his arms and yanked….
“Breathe! Breathe goddamnit!”
Floating through a dense miasma….
“Wake up, David!”
Rising….
“Breathe!”
Choking….
“I’m going for help. Stay still.”
Then slipping again into the comforting blackness.
David felt raindrops stinging his face. He opened his eyes, rolled on his side, and threw up filthy seawater. He hurt all over.
The typhoon had arrived. Waves crashed nearby, wind screeched over him, and the pier groaned against the storm’s irrefutable energy.
He pushed himself to a sitting position and tried not to pass out again. He swallowed hard several times. He reached into his pocket and pulled out Hulan’s cell phone. He opened it, and water poured out. He tossed it into the harbor, and an impression of sinking came to him. The harbor…. Tang had dumped David in the water just as Brian’s body had been tossed away like a piece of trash. The knowledge of what he must have ingested from the bay sent David’s guts into more spasms. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and saw his watch. His vision was blurry, and he blinked again and again, trying to get his eyes to focus. It was three in the morning. In his fogginess he tried to calculate how long he’d been out here. Six hours. Six lost hours. But he was alive. Ma had pulled him out of the harbor…. Didn’t he say he was coming back? David thought he remembered that…. maybe.
